2015/02/26

Berlin, February 26, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.1, the first minor release of LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 100 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.0. The release represents the combined effort of the over 900 developers attracted by the project since September 2010, with at least three new developers joining the project each month for 60 months in a row.

LibreOffice 4.4.1 and LibreOffice 4.3.6 are immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

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2015/02/24

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

develop and incorporate usability metrics collection for LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible.

In order to improve the user interface, human interaction and usability of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement a usability metrics collection feature to be incorporated into the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions of the free office suite. The project consists of:

planning and conception of features and clicks to track in close contact with our UX team, with preselection and prioritization of the features

a client part, that not only counts how often features have been used, but also provides further metrics; some samples of items that need tracking are

the location of the click action in the menu, as sometimes duplicates exist

which context menu was used

whether a certain feature was invoked by a single click, by click and hold, by a drop down click or by a multi click

from which application clicking on the close document/window ‘X’ (.CloseDoc) and close application ‘X’ (.Quit) occurs

whether the user used the enter key, mouse click or an accelerator to open a menu item

how the app was opened (via command line, start menu, start center, or by opening a document)

in which toolbar a button was clicked, as some buttons are in multiple toolbars, and users can add buttons to toolbars individually

which slide transitions and object animations are used most in Impress

the concrete action/command sequence: which action was used by the user, and which was the next action used after that (e.g. inserting an image and then adding a caption)

which menu bar keystroke sequences are used (e.g. Alt+F + O)

which icon theme, font list and theme name the user has activeWork on the client part also involves storing collected metrics data locally in the user profile with transmission to the server part when connectivity is in place.

an opt-in mechanism for the client part, so users have to actively enable the feature before any data is collected and transferred

With this feature, TDF – amongst other improvements – aims to:

improve the menus, toolbars and the sidebar

show the most popular inserted special characters for use in a future drop down

show the most popular bullet/numbering styles for use in a future drop down

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Companies and individuals applying can be located anywhere in the world.

Bids on individual work packages (#1-#4) are welcome.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.orgno later than April 1, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by April 30, 2015 should consider that their application, after careful review, could not be considered.

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2015/02/20

Berlin, February 20, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.6 “Still”, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, which is now the suggested version of the software for large deployments in the enterprise and conservative users. LibreOffice 4.3.6 contains over 110 bug fixes. The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice 4.3.6 in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified individuals (a list is available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/) capable of providing value added support.

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2015/02/10

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

develop and incorporate multi-language support for UI and test cases within Moztrap

to start work as soon as possible.

TDF currently plans to invest in expanding the capabilities of its test case management system (Moztrap). TDF’s instance of Moztrap, running MySQL as database backend, is currently only available in one language (English). In order to add more use cases and to incorporate more of our international community in testing, TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, expand the capabilities of Moztrap to allow its international community to:

ability to switch language of the UI (or make the UI localizable)

ability to manage test cases in several languages (including complex scripts and RTL)

ability to create runs in several languages (including complex scripts and RTL)

Note: TDF is not asking for the translation itself, only to add the ability for others to translate and add to native language instances of Moztrap.

Required Skills

Programming Languages

Python

Django

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including company presentation, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.orgno later than March 15, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by April 15, 2015 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Berlin, January 29, 2015 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce LibreOffice 4.4, the ninth major release of the free office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.

“LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky, a member of the Membership Committee and the leader of the design team. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.”

LibreOffice 4.4 offers several significant improvements in other areas, too:

Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows, and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;

Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;

Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related issues while opening OOXML files;

Addition of several new default templates, designed by volunteers;

Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering, and toggling bullets on or off;

Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;

The Document Foundation is an independent, self-governing and meritocratic organization, based on Free Software ethos and incorporated in Germany as a not for profit entity. TDF is focused on the development of LibreOffice – the best free office suite ever – chosen by the global community as the legitimate heir of OOo, and as such adopted by a growing number of public administrations, enterprises and SMBs for desktop productivity.

TDF is accessible to individuals and organizations who agree with its core values and contribute to its activities. At the end of December 2014, the foundation has 205 members and over 3,000 volunteer contributors worldwide.

2015/01/27

Berlin, January 27, 2015 – Following the successful release of the LibreOffice Viewer (Beta), The Document Foundation announces the results of the Android tender – http://tdf.io/tender – today. The tender aims at developing the technical framework that will ultimately power LibreOffice for Android, including the document editor. This tender is one more step towards a compelling, elegant and full-featured experience of LibreOffice on Android.

“We have received a large number of requests for LibreOffice on Android, but at the same time we have realized that without a solid base framework it would have been extremely difficult for the ecosystem to develop a full fledged application for that platform,” comments Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman. “With the other members of the BoD, we have then decided to use a portion of the money coming from donations to fund the development of such a framework. This represents an innovative way to spend donations money, and respects the will of the people who have donated to fund an Android application. We invite our happy users to keep on their support with donations.”

To confirm the interest for LibreOffice on Android, the Viewer – although still a Beta – has already been downloaded by tens of thousands of users in just a week, and reviewed by hundreds of websites.

Three work packages, out of the four included in the tender, have been assigned as follows: (1) infrastructure and (2) selections to Collabora, (4) cloud storage and e-mail to Igalia [details of the work packages are available on the tender page]. Results are expected during the month of March 2015.

“The tender process has been a completely new experience for the Board of Directors and for myself”, says Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “The most challenging part has been to create the format of the tender according to the principles set in our statutes, to set an even ground of competition for all the participants. Once again, we have set a new ground for free software foundations, by investing in the development of a framework, to foster the development of a full fledged LibreOffice for Android. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the companies who have sent their proposals, including those who have not been selected.”

The Document Foundation will be making the work available as a series of Beta builds over time which will incrementally add more powerful editing capabilities. Users are encouraged to download and play with the application, and provide their feedback to help improve the quality of the software.

The Document Foundation is grateful to all donors for their ongoing support of the project, through the donations page at: http://donate.libreoffice.org.

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2015/01/21

Berlin, January 21, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) is happy to see the LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) for Android released in the Google Play Store, allowing mobile users to access Open Document Format (ODF) files from devices such as tablets and smartphones.

The first release of LibreOffice Viewer handles text documents and basic presentations. Support for spreadsheets have been included in an early form, while support for more complex presentations is planned for a future release. Users are invited to download and test the application, although care is advised for production environments.

“Support for Android is the result of cooperation between organizations as well as individual contributors,” said Michael Meeks, VP of Productivity at Collabora, “LibreOffice’s open ecosystem has again proved its ability to bring diverse groups together to produce great software without restrictions”.

The mobile app fulfils the wishes of many users who access ODF files on the go, and is also able to read proprietary document formats from other suites including Microsoft Office.

“This release is the first of a new series of mobile applications,” said Björn Michaelsen, a Director of The Document Foundation. “Individuals, companies and organizations are encouraged to participate in the open development process by joining the LibreOffice community.”

The LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) has been created by Collabora with the support of SMOOSE. It is built on foundational work by the LibreOffice community, SUSE, and the Mozilla Corporation, with additional development by Jacobo Aragunde of Igalia, and Andrzej Hunt and Ian Billet as part of Google Summer of Code.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

2015/01/12

Berlin, January 12, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the city of Munich has joined TDF Advisory Board, where it will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the third largest in Germany – has launched Project LiMux to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013, which involved migrating 16,000 personal computers and laptops of public employees to free and open-source software. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011, to improve features targeted to enterprise environments.

“The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software, and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

Munich, Bavaria’s capital, between 2005 and 2013 has successfully managed to migrate around 16,000 PCs in 11 business units and 4 municipal undertakings to an open source based, standard and stable operating system. Munich is the largest public-sector open source stake holder in Germany, and Project LiMux has always had a high visibility.

Project LiMux has been able to reduce in a significant way the dependence from legacy proprietary software products, and attain – in the long term – the desired flexibility of software and architecture, based on three fundamental decisions:

– Introduce a free and open source operating system, with office communications based on open standards for all workstations;

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2014/12/22

The Document Foundation launches a competition to increase the number of document templates bundled with the upcoming major release of Libreoffice, open to designers, artists, and creatively talented users.

Deadline for submission, to be included in LibreOffice 4.4, is January 4, 2015. Templates submitted after this deadline will be considered for later LibreOffice major and minor releases, like LibreOffice 4.5 or LibreOffice 4.4.1.

Templates will be selected by the members of the LibreOffice Design Team, and may be edited before the inclusion. Authors of the templates bundled with LibreOffice 4.4 will get a free T-shirt either at LibreOffice booth at FOSDEM on Saturday January 31, or Sunday February 1, 2015, or by post after FOSDEM, and will be credited with a mention on http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/. They will also have a chance to meet LibreOffice developers and the design team during and after the show.

To be considered for inclusion, templates must meet the following conditions:

They are an original work, and are not converted from existing templates.

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2014/12/18

Berlin, December 18, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.5, the fifth minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “fresh” family, which is a stable release of the more advanced version of the software, targeted to individual and enterprise users. LibreOffice 4.3.5 contains over 70 bug fixes.

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice 4.3.5 in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified individuals (a list is available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/) capable of providing value added support.

The image on the left provides the updates figures about LibreOffice source code as provided by the Coverity Scan Service on December 14, 2014. To learn about LibreOffice and Coverity Scan, you can read this blog post.

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